Pendo Story: Act-On Software

Act-On Software is a marketing automation company delivering innovation that empowers marketers to do the best work of their careers. Gal Josefsberg is the VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at Act-On. Michael Owsley is a Product Marketing Specialist on his team. Together they have led the implementation of Pendo at Act-On. This implementation initially focused on empowering the product team but quickly grew to span multiple departments in the company.

“Act-On takes all of your online and offline marketing efforts and gives you the ability to orchestrate everything from brand awareness and demand generation, to retention and loyalty. With Act-On, marketers can drive better business outcomes and see higher customer lifetime value,” said Michael, “What differentiates Act-On is that we are focused on the success of our customers and making the product something that they can use and see immediate value from. We want to equip customers with the knowledge and tools that they need to achieve the same level of growth that we, ourselves, have experienced using Act-On.”

“Our pain was just the fact that we couldn’t figure out who was using our product and why,” said Gal. “We needed more information about our users. We’d go into these conversations like ‘well I think people are using it’, but we didn’t know for sure.” The product team led the initial implementation of Pendo, but soon the data began to be used across departments.

“We initially started with just the product managers. We looked at what’s being clicked on, what are the paths that users take through the application, and other user data. Other teams saw it, and the Customer Success and Sales people began using Pendo as well. Our Sales teams were interested in observing users that were in trial. They wanted to see who was actively using the product. In the same way, our Customer Success team wanted more visibility into what our paying customers were doing – seeing who were the heavy users, and what they were using.”

Using product data to drive feature development

With more detailed product data, Act-On has changed their approach to new feature development and roll out. “We recently built the New Landing Page Composer in our platform with the capability to allow users to drag and drop different blocks of content into a landing page,” said Michael. “The data from Pendo played an important role in optimizing the UI. Surprisingly, several of the blocks that we thought would have the highest usage returned different results.”

“For the landing page composer, the product team sent me a note with usage stats from Pendo,” said Gal. “It said here are the blocks that people are clicking on, and here are the things that aren’t successful. Pendo is definitely used as one of the major sources of information that we use in the development process.”

Customer marketing and outreach through Pendo

Product usage data in Pendo has not only helped Act-On identify customers to reach out to, but also allowed them to use their product as a new communication channel. “A lot of our customer outreach is now based on data we observe in Pendo,” said Gal. “When we’re rolling out new features, like our recent social outreach capabilities, we want to engage our power users first, people that we know will use the feature thoroughly and provide us feedback. Pendo helps us easily identify these users, and target our outreach.”

“We have begun to use Pendo as a platform to promote things outside of the product as well,” said Michael. “We run local roadshows for our customers and benefit from being able to segment our customers by location in Pendo. This allows us to target our customers in-app with highly relevant news and insight related to their location. With Pendo, we can ensure that the right subset of customers are made privy to the events taking place in their city, and in return we see higher registration rates.”

Act-On delivers roadshow invitations in Pendo

User segments and the broad reach of product data

After deploying Pendo, the Act-On team quickly began to drill into different user segments. “It’s interesting to see what different segments of customers use,” said Michael. “We found a whole set of users that were heavily using a particular feature that we plan to retire soon. With Pendo, we can dig into this feature to find out what is being used and who the heaviest users are so that we can reach out and see why they’re using it to prepare for a smoother transition to the feature that is replacing it.”

“Our head of Customer Success, our CMO, and myself have been using Pendo to help analyze our go-to-market approaches,” said Gal. “We segment our customers by size, Alexa ranking, and whether they use a CRM system. We pull these fields into Pendo from Salesforce, and look how these different segments interact with the product.

Act-On’s Segmented User Report

“CRM usage, especially, is an important predictor for us. If someone is investing in the customer relationship, we can tell them a better story about the value of marketing automation. The other day our CMO asked me about usage for this segment. Rather than answer, I just cut and pasted the chart from Pendo’s dashboard in our chat. In a way, these widgets have become an internal language for us. We added Pendo reports about feature usage in our last board presentation.”